South Africa.
He takes the chance to slip out of the company to find quiet where he can use his mobile. A passage past clamorous timpani of utensils and voices in a kitchen and farther on avoiding an open bedroom where a woman was admonishing a child in the special goodnight register, came upon another open door, a small room evidently the nook of someone who had to keep in touch with principals in the city — there were computers, calendars with circled dates under logos of insurance brokers, industrial companies. The call to the Suburb: summoning as if inside him. Jabu’s voice, no distance. — Jabu, hi you can’t imagine where I’m speaking from, darling, an old English farmhouse used as a weekend place, everybody, family African-style almost — but of course no one actually lives here. — Oh lovely. How’d you come to get there — The conference has a break Saturday Sunday, there are excursions, invitations, this’s the family of the director’s Girl Friday, public relations, she has to make arrangements for us all. She invited a couple of us but the other one didn’t show up. For once it isn’t raining in England, but of course I haven’t had a chance to walk around yet, there’re horses, I could go riding if I knew how…tell Gary I’m told the children have a donkey to ride, wouldn’t he love that — I won’t tell him, he’ll be cross because he’s not there with you! Anyway he’s got his pal to sleep over…but Stevie did you see…a farmer’s shot a man he saw on his mealie field, he says he thought it was a baboon — She doesn’t have to say white farmer (who else). — Justice Centre’s taking up proceedings for the man’s family, he was a worker on another farm coming to see a friend. — Oh my God (though since the days of being taken to church dutifully by his father he hasn’t believed there is One) I see only English papers, they wouldn’t be reporting that, too many big horror stories, Congo, Sudan, Iraq. I’ll go to the Embassy next week, must read our papers.—
She’s to be on the Centre’s team? — but as he begins to ask there’s a scuffle on the line and Gary Elias’s boasting — Dad, I came first in the Junior Marathon, we swam we biked we ran three kilometres — then Jabu called Sindiswa to take her turn.
— Weren’t you supposed to be back? — Of course Sindi’s so absorbed in her adolescent life it doesn’t much matter when it was he went away and when he was due home; it’s the beginning of a healthy independency Jabu didn’t remember — not with Baba. She doesn’t get the mobile back, it’s understood they’ll talk again without these interruptions of claims on him. — Love to you all. — and under contesting voices, for Jabu. — Home soon.—
And back in the present, the lively company, two old men in Fair Isle sweaters are arguing about the failure of some investment pending on the stock exchange (there’s nothing rural about that stock) while Jeremy has turned — his wife Tracy’s remarks affectionately, derisively ‘fantasising’—to talk about restocking what’s left of the old farm with a few cattle. — Stick to your horses. — Everyone helps to clear dishes and wine bottles, including the guest brought by the young woman they call Lyn. As goodnights are being noisily exchanged she waylays her brother. — What’s available? — His eyes swerve left to right as he hunches. — It’ll have to be the mill, everyone’s kids are so grown-up these days, they can’t bed down with mama and papa. Rooms chockablock. — Are there blankets and so on? — Well of course. Always. Beds made up. As far as I know.—
The mill. What mill. The purpose of a mill, the idea of a mill as a room for a night. She embraced all round here and there delayed to hear something shielded by the swung blind of her hair, and animated with private intimacies, she called, Come! The summons was to her car, they were to get in and drive to this mill. Only the headlights a monster’s eyes in the dark away from the lit farmhouse, a path crackling across stubble and then the monster’s sight discovering a shelter, small beside a shining — path? Stream. Must be a continuation of what he thought must be hung over by the curve of trees he’d made out in the dusk on arrival. He has no responsibility for anything; pleasurably tired, fed and wined. She’s in charge. The car’s eyes guide to a door, she shoves, it opens and her fingers find the switch, a room comes to life but there isn’t a moment for impression of what’s there, they are bent into the car to retrieve their bundles, she kills the car’s gaze, they bang its door shut and she enters the room for him, with him. She had expected his surprise, his questioning pause, pleasing to them both.
— It’s really a mill? Watermill?—
The bundles are dumped.
— It was; once. Like everything else around this place. No one knows when it was last working. Tomorrow you’ll see the wheel. Pity it’s not yet summer, too bloody cold to skinny-dip. The stream’s so clean, I love to sleep here, good thing there’s no room at the inn.—
It is just a room. Camping out: there are two beds as you’d have sleeping bags in a tent.
— But electricity, it surely can’t be coming all the way from the inn. — This is word-sparring fun.
— There’s a generator on, we can have a heater right away. Oh and you don’t have to go out in the dark, that little flap door has a loo behind it.—
— You think of everything. But you didn’t tell me this invitation was going to be an adventure in the wilds of England.—
She pulls an electric heater from under the only other piece of furniture beside beds, a table with a faience flower-patterned basin and matching jug, the kind you see in antique shops. At least she fumbles something: the connection of the heater, and he justifies his skilled male presence.
She emptied her hold-all upside down over a bed. So that’s hers.
He opens the tote bag and looks at what there is to take out. Pyjama shorts. He never wears a top. Perhaps he’ll just doss down as he is. She sweeps an arm in a bow to the flap door, he returns the gesture as she scoops some things from her stash and goes through the flap, there’s the sound of teeth-brushing and a brief rustling pause before she comes out in some sort of bunny-rabbit pyjama suit drawn in round each ankle on bare feet, curling up her toes against the cement floor. — Miracle. There are actually a couple of towels in there.—
In a space where he can hardly turn about himself there are indeed stowed as if in a packing case a toilet bowl, a tank and a shower over a drainage hole, hooked-up towels and a jug half-full of water that as he cups a handful to rinse his brushed teeth doesn’t taste like tap water, he fancies it comes from the mill stream. In his occupancy there’s the rush of the toilet after he’s peed; she evidently hadn’t had the need, hardly one to be shy of the natural, or maybe knowing the mill she’s taken the opportunity up at the house. Women are more private about body functions; they were even in the bush under fire.
She’s not in bed. She’s frustratedly turning over the spread contents of her hold-all. — I lose track of time, here. — He’s come out with his shirt loose over the lower part of him, the inadequate shorts, no fly, just pull up — they aren’t encountering each other at a swimming pool.
— Could kick myself — I’d forgotten way out of my mind I’d promised Professor Jacquard I’d postpone his TV interview.—
— You want to SMS him? — If she’s left her mobile where he saw it in the car, his is in his tote bag.